I’m doing something today that I don’t normally do: I’m not buying a new gun.
It’s not that I always buy a gun on the 4th of December, it is just that I could have, but didn’t.
You see, there is a sale of estate firearms going on today at the Central Whidbey Sportsman’s Association range today that a month ago I had full intentions of being at. In fact, seeing as how it was listed as ‘First Come, First Served’, I had planned on arriving over two hours early to make sure that I was the first person there and would therefore be able to pick up the particular firearm I wanted.
Like this one
I have coveted the Remington 513T Matchmaster since my childhood when my father decided that I wasn’t allowed to shoot the one he had inherited from my grandfather. Even at that time, these rifles were quite sought after and nowadays are some of the most expensive 22lr bolties around, some of the military marked ones going for around $800.
The one at the sale was only at 60% so it was being sold for $250, which I was fine with. I didn’t care if I had to replace the barrel and spend another hundred or so more to refinish the stock, I wanted my very own 513T.
Well, then I got pneumonia and I can’t really travel for an hour and a half without stopping to violently hack and cough eight or nine times at five minutes a pop. That and I decided that I wanted one that I wouldn’t have to spend a couple months rebuilding before I could shoot it.
The other deciding factor was the Analog Wife. Not that she wouldn’t let me buy the rifle, it is, after all, my money. It was more to the point that she has been coveting something that pertains to her favorite hobby.
Her hobby is watching TV. Not the most productive task, I’ll give you that, but at least she isn’t frittering away her time at one of the many local casinos or downing a fifth of vodka a day, so I can’t see too much harm in it. Especially since my hobby is putting small holes in paper from long distances. She claims that her tube addiction comes from the fact that she grew up on a military base and never had cable. I don’t know if I believe her or not as I grew up surrounded by firearms, yet that is all I want to do.
She had been coveting one of the ‘New and Improved’ HDTV sets and she spent weeks before Thanksgiving learning all about the different types of HDTV’s and their features and read all the consumer reports about which ones worked the best and had the better reliability rates. She picked a couple that suited her and went through all the ads for a couple weeks and watching the prices drop as Christmas approached. Her problem was that she still needed close to $300 to be able to buy a model I was particularly impressed with her description of at a price that was getting near half of what the thing was going for before Halloween.
Well, I just so happened to have a shade over that amount and after taking the above mentioned factors of the rifle purchase into account, I donated it to her ‘New TV Fund’.
We went out yesterday and picked it up, and since my only involvement in its purchase was donating the truck needed to bring the damnably large contraption home, doing the heavy lifting required to bring it into the house, setting it on the entertainment center and hooking it up, I haven’t the slightest clue as to what it is. I know it has a 34 inch screen because she kept saying that on the way there while bouncing up and down and clapping her hands, though the stereo speakers on the side of thing probably add another six or seven inches to its width and that it wasn’t one of those “HDTV Ready� jobbies as the converter is inside its rearward girth. Oh, and it is a JVC, just like the rest of our entertainment equipment. That was my one stipulation, since my money put her over the top.
It now dominates the living room, which is making her happy.
And this news that I may soon be able to dump close to half of my worthless cable channels if this legislation goes through is making me very happy because I may start watching TV again.
Of course, it is making the lefties pull their hair out and wish death upon those on the right. Because it is “A Right” to some idiots to make us pay for channels we will never watch.
(Links found at LGF)
BTW, I’ve decided that I’ll just wait until I pay the truck off in the next couple months and use my non-existent truck payment dollars to buy my 513T. Unless, of course, I get sidetracked by something else. Which is entirely possible, just not very probable.
Fine rifle. My high school shooting club has several R512s & R513s, couple of Win52’s and ONE Savage-Anschutz with all the bells and whistles.
Mr. Walton, the Shooting Coach (also head Math teacher), used a competitive system. You had to be the top shooter to get the Anschutz, so I worked VERY hard at it. Got there in due time.
RE: The “pay-per-channel” legislation: On the surface it sounds like a good deal, and the idiotic music channels you never listen to will probably just go away, but I sense danger here.
The cable TV companies have adopted Bill Gates’ “planned obsolescence” business strategy, and so there will have to be a RENTAL gizmo to let you cut out channels from the line up, and keep track of the ones you watch. That gizmo will change appearance every couple of years, requiring you to turn it in for a new one, and of course, a fee boost. This happened in the early days of cable, if you are old enough to remember.
The pricing of the pay-by-channel is yet to be decided, and if the cable companies have THEIR way, in the Grand American Capitalist style, you can bet the best channels will be the most expensive.
As I see the “sea change”, it will be taken advantage of by the cable companies to get more $$$ out of the customers. It would be very easy for them to figure out which channels were the most popular, and put the whole lineup on a spread sheet for pricing, their objective being to INCREASE profit over the current scheme of basic/standard/digital/digital plus movies.
I see the “free” channels going away in my lifetime. If you think that they are forever, consider this: they depend on content for advertising rates, and as soon as the cable/satellite companies find a way to siphon off that good and watchable content, the ad revenue will sink so low as to make the networks buyout targets.
The “foot in the door” case here is Monday Night Football. Everyone thought it would stay on ABC, or maybe another broadcast network forever, because it commands HUGE ad rates for it’s HUGE viewership. Guess what? Starting next year, you will have to be a cable or satellite subscriber to get it. It has moved to ESPN, effective next NFL season.
Technology is driving all this: HDTV is the villain. I have a good friend who is an engineer for KGW-TV8, the local NBC affilliate. He has the date in his pocket when KGW throws the switch and instantly outmodes all present TV receivers that operate on the NTSC format. That date is in 2008.
It’s very expensive for the TV stations to have to maintain two separate transmissions systems, NTSC and ATSC (HDTV). Unless a Communist government takes over, they won’t do it, and will turn off the NTSC soon.
Planned Obsolescence. You have it in your computer that you blog with, the cars in your driveway and it’s in your TV, too.